Events

The City of Lights has done a mitzvah for its citroyens, essentially banning cars from the city center in part by providing real alternatives: French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism...

I'm taking a quiet day after our annual fundraiser. I should find out by next week exactly what our fundraising haul was. I do know that one of my friends outbid me for something I'd stored at my house since our 2019 fundraiser, which means I'll have to store it at my house again for a couple of weeks until they pick it up. Otherwise, a really fun evening, with something like 800 photos that I have to go through now at some point soon.

I mentioned Thursday that the Disney Corp. appears to have beaten Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' (R) plan to penalize them for taking a pro-queer stance. Our side are laughing out loud at how incompetent the DeSantis Administration had to be to let this happen, given it took Disney 10 months of public hearings to neuter the incoming board. But as Josh Marshall points, DeSantis never cared about the win; he only cared about the spectacle: Florida has particularly robust public notice laws. So this was...

The Manhattan District Attorney's office reported last night that a New York grand jury has returned an indictment of former president Trump, the first time this has happened in the 234-year history of the office. Reports this morning say the grand jury charged him with over 30 counts of business crimes, but at the moment, no one outside the jury room and a handful of lawyers knows what the indictment contains. The XPOTUS will travel to New York for his formal arrest, booking, and arraignment on...

Political satirist Mark Russell will be missed: With his deadpan solemnity, stars-and-stripes stage sets and fusty bow ties, Mr. Russell looked more like a senator than a comic. But as the capital merry-go-round spun its peccadilloes, scandals and ballyhooed promises, his jaunty baritone restored order with bipartisan japes and irreverent songs to deflate the preening ego and the Big Idea. Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump caught the flak. He sang “Bail to the Chief” for Richard M. Nixon, urged George...

Once again, I have too much to read: After Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) tried to end Disney's control over the municipal area around Disneyworld, the outgoing board added a series of restrictive covenants completely neutering DeSantis' hand-picked replacements, including a rule-against-perpetuities clause tying the covenants to the last living descendant of King Charles III. Robert Wright observed ChatGPT expressing cognitive empathy. An anonymous source provided a German reporter with 5,000 pages...

Here's why your suburb will go bankrupt in 25 years if it doesn't start building a denser environment: Really, it's arithmetic. And you can generalize this principle to understand why building new highways instead of fixing old ones makes no financial sense. But that's old news.

I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet: Fifty years ago today, United States combat troops left South Vietnam. The DC foreign policy elite have grown impatient for President Biden to articulate a clearer policy on Ukraine. The Post has a fascinating story of a Russian spy who posed as a Brazilian student to get into Johns Hopkins, but got arrested when he tried to take a new job at the International Criminal Court using his fake identity....

Merle Hazard, ladies and gentlemen:

The UK Labour Party's National Executive Committee voted today to de-list former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, meaning he cannot stand for election as a Labour candidate from now on: A Labour spokesman said the leader’s motion passed by 22 votes to 12, meaning it is now down to Corbyn to decide whether to run as an independent candidate. Corbyn, the veteran left-winger who has represented Islington North since 1983, had criticised the move as “undermining the party’s internal democracy” before its...